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Apr 6, 2017, 07:00am

Five KPIs You Should Be Monitoring To Ensure Your Digital Strategy Is Working

With all the key performance indicators in the business industry, it can be hard to figure out which ones to focus on in order to effectively measure the success of your digital strategy. For starters, there are standard KPIs, which are the must-haves for any business. These then get broken down into five more specific KPIs, all in an effort to measure the performance of your digital strategy. While each serves a purpose of its own, there are some KPIs that allow you to quickly analyze the performance of your digital campaign.

1. Brand Engagement On Website

Your brand is the heart of your company. Without it, customer loyalty can be almost impossible to build; creating a competitive advantage can be even more difficult. Your brand is how customers recognize your company, products, services and values. It’s what separates you from your direct competitors. In order to properly measure brand engagement on your website, you need to analyze the more-refined KPIs that provide valuable metrics, such as:

Number of unique visitors

Number of return visitors

Time spent on website

Popular pages and how customers got there

Number of people registering for something

These are vital KPIs to measure, as they let you know what your customers are doing on your website. These metrics can tell you whether your customers are interested in what you’re saying, or whether they're immediately exiting your website upon arrival. They also tell you how many new customers you’re bringing in versus how many repeat customers you have, what your customers find most interesting, what they want from your website, etc. Without these KPIs, your digital strategy is a total guessing game.

Analyze these metrics and form a strategy based on the results – and revise them as data continues to come in.

2. Traffic Sources

To ensure a powerful digital strategy, you need to know where your customers are coming from. With this KPI, you can determine what or who is driving visitors to your website. If one traffic source is significantly higher than others, analyze it and see what can be changed to make all traffic sources as successful. The four main traffic sources to measure are:

Direct. This refers to visitors who visit your website by typing the URL into their browser.

Referral. This refers to the visitors who ended up on your website after clicking a link on another website.

Organic. This refers to the visitors who found your website after searching in a search engine.

Campaign. This refers to visitors who visited your site through a campaign or advertisement.

3. Landing Page Conversions

Your digital strategy was designed based on a goal. The purpose could be to grow your newsletter list, increase the number of downloads of your e-book, get customers to create an account, etc. Whatever that goal is, you need KPIs to track whether your landing page is sending your customer on the correct path to have them complete the intended goal of a page.

This metric can be a little difficult to measure, as you may have a different goal per landing page. However, Google Analytics provides reports that can help you measure both organic traffic and paid search traffic. Paid search refers to customers who found your website as a result of an advertisement, such as a pay-per-click campaign.

For both forms of traffic, you can create a custom report from your Google Analytics account to measure the traffic on each page. Then, you can compare the data with the conversion rates to determine the landing page conversions. By doing so, you can see which landing pages are most valuable and bringing in a large number of conversions. More importantly, you can also determine which landing pages need to be revised to increase landing page conversions. For example, if a landing page is getting a high amount of traffic with very little conversions, something needs to change.

Use A/B testing to determine how you can get a higher conversion rate. Some simple changes you may want to test out are:

Changing your call to action

Changing the call to action button

Revising the written content

Adding reviews and testimonials

4. Inbound Marketing ROI

Whatever the goal, you want to see a return on investment. It can sometimes be difficult to see the full potential and value of inbound marketing without KPIs. After all, it’s hard to measure the ROI on the last 50 blog posts you recently produced or the 20 hours you spent on Instagram. However, with the inbound marketing ROI, you’ll quickly see the performance of such campaigns.

This is important because you don’t want to continue spending money on inbound marketing tactics that aren’t working for your company. The only way to see that is with this KPI. The formula is: ROI = (sales growth – marketing investment) / marketing investment.

If your digital strategy doesn’t include social media, you need to revise it immediately. Social media is a powerhouse and has proven to be incredibly successful for many businesses. However, simply creating accounts on popular platforms and posting an update once in a while won’t do you justice.

There are various KPIs you can use to measure the impact your social media has had on the overall success of your business:

Number of leads generated from each social media channel

Number of conversions generated from each social media channel

Number of customers reaching out to your company via each social media channel

Percentage of traffic coming from social media channels

Capitalizing on all of the most popular social media platforms can be time-consuming and costly. By using these KPIs, you can determine which social media platforms bring in the highest conversion rates. Moving forward, you can revise your digital strategy to focus on the platforms that deliver.

There’s no shortage of KPIs available to properly measure the success of your digital strategy. If you stay on top of these metrics, you can revise your strategy as needed to ensure a powerful digital strategy moving forward.

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